Menagerie used a lot of footage from the original pilot (which failed), which was called, "The Cage." "Menagerie" used the pretext of a court martial hearing to tell the story and show most of the footage from "The Cage."
No, it's not a fad, it's just a new name. The technology has been available since IE4 and NS 4. Sure you had to use iFrames and it was an ugly hack (and it still is), but it WAS possible. What's new is that Google released Google Maps and showed all the suits out there that it really works and wasn't just some pipe dream that an occasional developer would talk about.
My boss at a former job used an exercise ball (70 cm or so) instead of a chair. He was a fitness nut and claimed that the act of balancing yourself on the ball helped tone a multitude of muscles in your torso. My wife, who had been having a lot of back pain, decided to try it out. Within 2 weeks, her back pain was gone. She has been using the ball for a few months now and loves it so much that she gave away her office chair. I've tried it and its very comfortable, plus keeping yourself balanced tends to leave you moving around slightly so that you don't stay locked in one position. I can't speak for how it might help a programmer, but it certainly helped her. (She's a geologist.) And it is a much cheaper alternative to an ergonomic chair.
Perhaps it is because I've been chained to MS technologies so much over the years, but my personal experience has been that GUI applications are best written by hand. HTML that is generated by the GUI in FrontPage is atrocious. DreamWeaver's code is much better, but still not as clean as what you can accomplish in VIM (or jEdit, notepad, etc.) And I've never seen anything that did better than DreamWeaver. I haven't had a chance to play with Atlas yet, but considering Microsoft's track record with HTML, I doubt it will produce clean code.
OK, so what is wrong with using iFrames? Is AJAI not a sexy enough acronym?
Seriously. IFrame support has been around for quite some time and works well in most major browsers. You just hide the iframe and communicate to the server through it. I've done this lots of times, long before AJAX was around. It even worked in IE 4 and NS 4.7x if I remember right.
Sure, its not as elegant as using XMLHTTPRequest, but when is cross-browser javascript ever elegant? Is it better to have a hidden iframe on your page, or several lines of IE-specific code and dependence on an ActiveX control?
That's just my 2 clams. I've only just started working with XMLHTTPRequest, so I might be missing something. Please enlighten me if there is some major advantage that I'm not seeing.
Slashdot Mirror
Menagerie used a lot of footage from the original pilot (which failed), which was called, "The Cage." "Menagerie" used the pretext of a court martial hearing to tell the story and show most of the footage from "The Cage."
No, it's not a fad, it's just a new name. The technology has been available since IE4 and NS 4. Sure you had to use iFrames and it was an ugly hack (and it still is), but it WAS possible. What's new is that Google released Google Maps and showed all the suits out there that it really works and wasn't just some pipe dream that an occasional developer would talk about.
My boss at a former job used an exercise ball (70 cm or so) instead of a chair. He was a fitness nut and claimed that the act of balancing yourself on the ball helped tone a multitude of muscles in your torso. My wife, who had been having a lot of back pain, decided to try it out. Within 2 weeks, her back pain was gone. She has been using the ball for a few months now and loves it so much that she gave away her office chair. I've tried it and its very comfortable, plus keeping yourself balanced tends to leave you moving around slightly so that you don't stay locked in one position. I can't speak for how it might help a programmer, but it certainly helped her. (She's a geologist.) And it is a much cheaper alternative to an ergonomic chair.
Perhaps it is because I've been chained to MS technologies so much over the years, but my personal experience has been that GUI applications are best written by hand. HTML that is generated by the GUI in FrontPage is atrocious. DreamWeaver's code is much better, but still not as clean as what you can accomplish in VIM (or jEdit, notepad, etc.) And I've never seen anything that did better than DreamWeaver. I haven't had a chance to play with Atlas yet, but considering Microsoft's track record with HTML, I doubt it will produce clean code.
Seriously. IFrame support has been around for quite some time and works well in most major browsers. You just hide the iframe and communicate to the server through it. I've done this lots of times, long before AJAX was around. It even worked in IE 4 and NS 4.7x if I remember right.
Sure, its not as elegant as using XMLHTTPRequest, but when is cross-browser javascript ever elegant? Is it better to have a hidden iframe on your page, or several lines of IE-specific code and dependence on an ActiveX control?
That's just my 2 clams. I've only just started working with XMLHTTPRequest, so I might be missing something. Please enlighten me if there is some major advantage that I'm not seeing.